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The Procurement Blueprint - Issue #10
HEY AGAINLast week, a reader told me my writing sounded a bit too much like AI.Which is kinda funny, because I don’t know many algorithms who’ve spent twenty years chasing down suppliers, rewriting contract clauses at midnight, or trying to convince finance that “urgent” means this quarter. So I thought I better explain to you why this week I have changed my tone of voice. There will be fewer bullet points and more sentences that breathe while I am attempting to sound less like a template and more like the way people actually speak when they care about something. So today’s first piece is about trust. The quiet kind of trust that makes suppliers pick up the phone when things go wrong. The second looks at technology, and what happens when we let it make decisions that used to belong to us. Both in their own way are about control and what happens when we forget who still has it. |  |
In Today's Issue
The Quiet Fix
TRUST IS THE LEVER
A supplier once told me (over a rather very bad cup of coffee) that working with our company, my employer at the time, felt like “dating someone who only calls when they need to borrow money.”
WOW.
That was BRUTAL.
But it is true that we, as Procurement, often forget that trust is the currency suppliers run on and where it actually lives is in the small signals that say “you can rely on us”.
It’s in the invoice that gets paid without chasing
The forecast that actually matches reality
The stakeholder who doesn’t cancel three meetings in a row
Tiny things by anyone´s standards really! But suppliers notice them in the way you’d notice a neighbour who always returns your bin to the right spot (I used to have one of those, still love him).
Not headline-worthy, but very memorable.
The irony is that trust is cheaper to build than any platform we will ever implement.
And you don’t need blockchain or predictive analytics for it but rather small habits: simply reply when you say you’ll reply, share what you know instead of hoarding it and invite people in before the RFP is carved in stone.
This doesn´t just apply to procurement but life.
And most of this is free… well, apart from the discipline to actually do it.
So when things go wrong (which they always do) trust is the difference between being first on the call list or left refreshing the portal while your competitors get the last stock on the truck.
We talk a lot about resilience and risk, but half the time resilience is just having a supplier who believes you won’t throw them under the bus when things get messy.
That belief is earned slowly and lost instantly.
So if you’re looking for a quiet fix this month, don’t update a policy or fiddle with a dashboard.
Try something simpler: keep a promise, share an awkward truth early, or call that supplier when you don’t need something.
It works better than any “transformation initiative” I’ve ever seen.
And if transformation is actually what you are looking for after all, then you should also read the Pure Procurement newsletter. My talented friend Jöel writes it. He has that rare mix of technical fluency and human insight that makes procuretech feel less like jargon and more like possibility. As a subscriber, I highly recommend.
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The Tech Bit
CAN PROCUREMENT TECH BE WEAPONISED?
The first time someone showed me a supplier scoring dashboard was an event I still remember vividly to this day.
I was told (with the kind of smug confidence usually reserved for wine sommeliers) that it was objective. Naturally.
Yes, it was gloriously objective: 70% of the score handed to cost, a pitiful 5 per cent tossed at sustainability, and the rest sprinkled over whichever categories were fashionable that particular year.
The outcome was so simply inevitable that it was already written in the code.
That was my early introduction to how technology can upholster bias. And once you notice it, you see it absolutely everywhere:
Spend dashboards that consolidate categories until savings look wonderfully heroic.
Risk engines that measure financial ratios with surgical precision while ignoring the inconvenient fact a supplier’s main plant is built on a floodplain (real case scenario!)
Contract analytics that faithfully pull out liability caps yet miss the sneaky clauses that shift risk back onto you.
And believe me, AI doesn’t fix these blind spots but rather industrialises them.
Once an algorithm decides who passes the first gate, the real power lies with whoever positioned the gateposts.
So what do we do then? There are few things that have worked for me and others:
Interrogate the model Ask what the system isn’t measuring. If ESG or resilience aren’t in the data, they’re quite likely excluded.
Keep the human override If the score says amber but your team’s experience says green, record the override and the reason. Rigour is not blind obedience.
Rotate your lens Don’t let one dataset define a supplier. Check operational incidents, delivery reliability, even the news cycle. A model is only one view.
Audit the outputs Pick a decision every quarter, trace it back through the tool, and ask what it got right and what was wrong.
Governments are experimenting on this in the open.
For example, Albania now has an AI “minister” for tenders, New South Wales is feeding oceans of procurement data into algorithms to sniff out cartels… but the same dynamics play out quietly inside corporate systems every day.
And the tools aren’t the problem.
I love a clean dashboard as much as anyone (maybe even a bit more), but the problem is forgetting that they’re built on human choices and then treating their outputs as if they’ve descended from Mount Olympus.
And once we forget that, procurement isn’t becoming more transparent but simply more obedient.
Procurement might be getting more obedient, but at least the rest of us are getting more remote. And remote work comes with its own quiet rebellions: the camera permanently off, the inbox that never sleeps, the strange guilt of finishing a task too quickly.
Remote Source writes about that world with more honesty than most. No hype, no “digital nomad” mythology but just the reality of working, thinking, and occasionally thriving from wherever your laptop decides to connect that day. It’s one of the few newsletters that understands remote work isn’t freedom or failure. It’s both, depending on the Wi-Fi.
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My Best Post Lately
WHAT THE TOP 1% DO DIFFERENTLY
I wrote this thinking maybe twenty people would relate. Like the ones of us who’ve spent years being mistaken for “the process people.” But it turns out there are a lot more of us.
It’s about the quiet ones in procurement.
The people who don’t need to say they’re strategic because you can tell from the way the room shifts when they speak and the ones who spot the missing line in a 60-page contract and save everyone a small fortune before lunch.
Apparently that struck a chord… or maybe it was just the relief of being seen!
Either way, it’s the post that reminded me how many good people make this profession work, without ever getting the credit… or the decent coffee.
Free Template(s) of the week
MY BEST-SELLING CATEGORY PLAN
I’ve spent more hours than I’d care to admit building category plans for companies that run on the scale of small nations. Plans for marketing, logistics, IT, HR, even glassware… you name it.
Each time, the brief given was always the same: make it strategic, make it simple, and make it convincing enough to survive the boardroom.
So, over the years, I built a structure that so far has never failed me. Ten slides that somehow hold together everything procurement ever tries to explain: the market, the spend, the strategy, the risk, the politics.
A way to turn scattered excel chaos thoughts into something that looks calm and inevitable… almost elegant.
That’s what I’m sharing this week. My enterprise-grade category plan.
This is the one that’s been through global reviews, late-night deadlines, and too many versions of PowerPoint to count. It comes with prompts, examples, and all the small details that make it feel considered rather than cobbled together.
If you’ve ever stared at a blank slide trying to turn data into strategy, this will save you. Not because it does the thinking for you, but because it gives your thinking somewhere to live.
It’s free for exactly 3 days only and after that, it goes back into the vault where all good templates hide between projects.
A Final Note
There’s a line in Jurassic Park I’ve always liked, the one where Jeff Goldblum says:
“You were so preoccupied with whether you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”
It’s meant as a warning about science, but it could just as easily be about procurement. About technology, ambition, the speed we move at when we forget to question our own logic.
Most of the mistakes I’ve seen in this field didn’t come from bad intentions, just from the quiet momentum of people doing what they could, because they could.
So before you go, I’d love to hear from you. What did you think of this week’s edition? Does this more conversational tone feel closer to how procurement actually sounds in real life, or do you prefer the cleaner, structured version?
And while you’re at it, tell me what you’d like to see next. The kind of freebie or deep-dive that would genuinely help in your day-to-day work, not just look good on a LinkedIn post.
You can just hit reply. I read every message.
Until next time,
Procurement worth reading.